In chapter 10 I found the answers to a lot of questions that I had about one of my former employer's firing practices. It was very interesting to read about why they would do some of the things they did, especially in an at-will employment state.
The concept that I had been wondering about was why my employer wouldn't just terminate those employees that were not performing at a level that was even half of the expected performance level. It was very frustrating to watch as they tried to find some other reason to fire them, and at times the reasons they found were worse in my opinion than simply firing the person for not performing.
There are many reasons that I found that told me why my employer was so careful with firing people. The biggest was fear of a lawsuit. This fear drove them to develop policies on termination that left them almost no way of keeping good employees and weeding out those who needed to be weeded out.
There is so much involved in trying to keep turnover low, but is it a good decision some times to just terminate an employee and start over? To what point should an employer go to keep a high performing employee content?
How can employers keep themselves safe from lawsuits and still leave themselves elbow room when terminating employees fairly?

After the guest speaker in class on Thursday I realized that training programs can be a good thing. When a company invests money in its training program, it is almost always cost effective, as long as the employees take it seriously. Training can be used to keep motivation and morale high, making the company more productive and more fun to work at. In many lines of work, a training program can keep the workplace safe, especially if taken seriously.

It seems to me that most small companies can design training systems fairly easily. They simply walk an employee through the first couple of days, and then watch him or her for a while, providing small help here and there to ensure the job is getting done correctly. In a large company, it is slightly more difficult. A large company worries more about costly mistakes that can be caused by under-training. In a company that I worked for, there was an extensive online training program, and then once every few weeks we had to go to a classroom type training program to learn more about the company's policies. Both the online program and the classroom program were very dull and hard to get through, and therefore I feel they were reasonably ineffective. Would it be cost effective for a company to invest in a more entertaining and captivating training program? Would it help drive down the cost of mistakes that are caused by employees that didn't pay attention to the training? What can a company do to stress the importance of the simple, dull training that they have in place?